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1) An even start for every faction - no special advantages or disadvantages
2) Oblivious to where other factions have landed - we need to discover where they are like in other Civ games
3) A blind research option as in Alpha Centauri.

1) An even start for every faction - no special advantages or disadvantages

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What are those special advantages you are talking about? Do you think some sponsors are stronger than others, cargo is not balanced, some players randomly get better starting positions? This could mean a lot of different things.

2) Oblivious to where other factions have landed - we need to discover where they are like in other Civ games

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Not sure where this is defined. Unless it has been hard coded in the dll it's probably easy to revert as it would just be a matter of finding where they added this automatic contact and disable it (often easier to disable a feature than add a new one). If it's in the dll you would have to wait for the source code and be good at C++

3) A blind research option as in Alpha Centauri.

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Well, i played SMAC but it was a long time ago. Don't even remember something called Blind Research. What was this about?

Blind research goals were an advanced game condition that meant you could never choose an actual research to research. Instead they were divided into disciplines that you could focus in (vaguely-separated much like how BE's Virtues are) and the game chose the research for you dependent on which disciplines you had ticked at any one time.

Ticking only Conquest would research pretty much nothing but weapon techs, etc.

That would be by far the hardest thing to implement. You'd have to heavily modify the research UI to make most stuff invisible and essentially make up the broad categories as they don't exist in the base game (making a UI for that in the process). After that, random tech selection should be a breeze, but the bulk of the work would take place before that point. Oh, well, you'd also have the whole AI side to deal with, not only to make the other players sensibly choose categories as they research, but also to do so based on their personalities.

"Do not forget your great guns, which are the most respectable arguments of the rights of kings."- Frederick the Great

Blind research goals were an advanced game condition that meant you could never choose an actual research to research. Instead they were divided into disciplines that you could focus in (vaguely-separated much like how BE's Virtues are) and the game chose the research for you dependent on which disciplines you had ticked at any one time.

Ticking only Conquest would research pretty much nothing but weapon techs, etc.

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I remember blind research being the default and directed research being the special option.

What are those special advantages you are talking about? Do you think some sponsors are stronger than others, cargo is not balanced, some players randomly get better starting positions? This could mean a lot of different things.

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I believe the intention was to eliminate each sponsor's special features outright. No one gets a free Old Earth relic. No one is particularly good at espionage, commerce, or conducting warfare. That sort of thing.

I don't think the special advantages refer to cargo or specialists, but it could, I imagine.

What I would like to see in MOD(s):
2) Oblivious to where other factions have landed - we need to discover where they are like in other Civ games

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Exploration and the thrill of discovery is a great feature of all the games of the franchise, but it does, to me, seem counterintuitive that planetary colonists just land on a planet willy-nilly, without doing any sort of preliminary survey. To wit, you have to actually choose the option of knowing where coastlines, mineral resources, or alien nests are located. It seems they would have already figured some of this out while in orbit. And as for discovering where other people are...don't they have radio technology in the future?

Granted, it takes some of the fun out of it, yes, yes, and yes, but it seems more plausible that the factions would know where the others have landed rather than less. But the rationale for your idea would be transmission-blocking technology, stealth, counterespionage, illicit/unauthorized colonization, cloaking devices borrowed from the Klingons and Romulans, and so forth.